Innovating for sustainability through collaborative innovation contests
article
Innovation contests are increasingly used by businesses as an instrument for open innovation to address sus tainability related questions. However, according to the open innovation literature, one of the main pitfalls of this approach can be the mismatch between the solutions proposed by non-experts and the companies’ capa bilities to implement such solutions. We introduce the concept of collaborative innovation contests – where companies actively collaborate with non-experts – as a way to address this mismatch. Through participant ob servations, we analyse the process of a sustainability-oriented collaborative innovation contest guided by design thinking. Our results indicated that the combination of an open innovation contest and design thinking could, through the creation of constant feedback loops, lead to increased collaboration between the contests partici pants, the companies proposing a challenge, and other relevant stakeholders. However, our results also high lighted trade-offs between the innovativeness of ideas, the alignment of solutions with firm capabilities and the resources needed for collaborative innovation contests. We conclude that, through the involvement of different stakeholders, their ideas and perspectives, collaborative innovation contests are a useful approach to generate a comprehensive understanding of the sustainability challenges companies face.
TNO Identifier
957431
ISSN
09596526
Source
Journal of Cleaner Production, 311(127628)
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